Home Is Where the Hope Is

Home is not where you live but where they understand you. ~ Christian Morgenstern

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I've been thinking about writing this post for a while, ever since I read Relyn's Thinking of Home a couple of weeks ago, and since then too, reading Julochka's recent post on having her family come to visit her in Denmark.


When I read Relyn's loving description of her teenage years growing up in the South, in the mountains of Tennessee and other states, the country sounds, the people, for a moment I could see her memories as if they were my own, and realized I don't have that sort of connection to the place I grew up in. It made me wistfully sad, like I had missed out on something I could not put my finger on, but it was there all the same.

It's not that I wasn't raised in a nice home, with parents who loved me and took good care of me, and a sister I adored, but that the place itself--San Jose--was flat and featureless. People did not register with me, nor I with them. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's the impression I walked away with. Is that how suburbs are?

Everyone there came from everywhere else but still never seemed to come together as a community. It's a city that had, and still has, in my opinion, no sense of self. No sense of place. No roots. I mean, I'm sure it does. Every place has a history but San Jose's history wasn't mine.

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And then I realized that in my whole entire life, in all these years, I finally feel at home...here. In San Francisco. It's hard to describe, but it feels like I've come home even though I never lived here before this time.

And again, it's even not this particular home I live in, although I love my neighborhood and my flat, with its crazy piles of books and dvds and hats and shoes and laughs and The Boy with his dimple. It's this place. It's this city.

I can walk down the block to get groceries from the little market owned by five brothers from Jordan. They're not friendly at first meeting, but when they've seen you once or twice, they warm up to you and chat. Or when I go to the nail salon owned by the Vietnamese cousins, and spend an extra hour there just catching up on recent events. But it's not just my neighborhood. Almost anywhere in the city, I feel welcomed or at least noticed in some way, at some point.

San Francisco, for all of its trying to be a city, feels like a constellation of those small towns that Relyn described, connected by a commonality that comes from this place, this here and this now.

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I think part of the reason that this post finally came together with thoughts was because of the photos in this post that I took last week in the Lower Haight.

I was walking all over, looking up and down and all around for things to take photos of. I encountered the most interesting street art. And then when I started consciously looking for it, I found even more. It was like an Easter egg hunt.

First I found this in a doorway:


And then this interesting little creature perched on the side of a house:


The art intrigued me so much. I want to find the artist behind this work and thank him/her for leaving little bits of beauty around the place.

Can you read this?


It says, "Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away."


And then on another block, I found this painting, obviously by the same artist:

This piece says, "The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merly [sic] to grasp the world but to change it."

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I like living in a place where you can walk past little bits of colorful hope, just left out for you by someone you may never meet, to find and smile and wonder about.

It's almost like having a second childhood here. Having a home that I wouldn't have known to imagine but just fell into, happily.

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"San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality" ~ Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane